Once the shining star on any resume, the MBA has lost some of its shine in recent years.
So Canadian business schools have been busy reinventing their MBA programs to produce graduates who may once again become a hot commodity for corporate Canada.
In a report released earlier this year, The Conference Board of Canada blamed a “leadership gap,” for the underperformance of Canadian companies and yet some recruiters say there has been a dramatic drop in the demand for MBA grads, once thought of as the natural leaders of tomorrow’s businessworld. The reason? Besides being devalued slightly by their sheer numbers, academics and recruiting specialists alike say the business world has changed dramatically while the business schools hadn’t.
MBA programs aren’t teaching students how to function quickly and effectively in the real world, says Michael Stern of the executive recruitment firm Michael Stern and Associates. “People are looking for someone who can hit the ground running: preferably tomorrow, preferably tomorrow morning.
“To the extent the MBA gives someone a broad business background, it’s nice icing on the cake but it’s thin,” he says. More than a solid grounding in the theory of advanced statistics and financial accounting, businesses want people who have experience applying that theory in the real world. He says that if business schools want to graduate students who will become hot commodities again, they should make much greater use of work terms and co-op programs, consult industry more in structuring MBA programs and find instructors who have more experience in the business world who can pass on their experiences to their students.
Hearing rumblings of discontent and noticing a loss of interest in some of their grads, the business schools are trying to respond.
The result has been a greater emphasis on applied and experiential learning from almost all corners and a trend toward MBA specializations, but for the past two years, the University of Toronto has been raising eyebrows and turning heads as it strives to completely reinvent itself.
Canada has to produce better business talent if it hopes to remain competitive, admits Roger Martin, Dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
Since joining the school in September 1998 Martin has been pushing to reinvent the school’s MBA program — what he calls “Business School 2.0” — with the intent of becoming one of the top 10 business schools in the world by the end of the decade. They started by identfying what they were doing wrong.
He admits a large number of companies have searched for the best graduates from a class and still been disappointed by their ability to adapt, to apply their knowledge and to grow, he says.
Instead businesses were taking many of their MBA graduates and retraining them. “If that’s the case, we came to the conclusion that we have to do a better job of teaching them how to think,” says Ramy Elitzur, an associate professor and executive director of MBA programs at the University of Toronto.
“One of the things that’s wrong with business schools is that they don’t integrate,” says Elitzur. “General MBA programs create people who think in silos. But an accounting problem is not just an accounting problem, they (graduates) have to think about other functions.” So now, in an effort to get students to think more about the big picture, starting from day one, MBA students at Rotman’s take a course that focuses specifically on integrative thinking.
There is also a growing recognition that “broadness and the ability to think,” will define successful managers in the new business environment. (“The best thing you can do is get a good liberal arts undergraduate degree and then go to business school at the graduate level,” Martin says.)
“There’s an argument that people who go to business school are brittle.” They reject new thinking rather than integrate it because it threatens to unravel the brittle foundation upon which their knowledge is based. This is particularly true at an interpersonal level. When people are challenged with different opinions, they tend to dismiss the person with the differing view as mean-spirited or stupid rather than looking for new insights into the matter at hand even if that means approaching something in a completely different manner, he explains.
“IQ doesn’t do it alone. EQ is as important,” he says. And unlike IQ, which is essentially innate, “EQ can be improved if you work at it.” So the U of T is putting a greater emphasis on some of the soft skills.
There was a common complaint: “We have really smart people but it’s unclear if they know how to learn,” he says. In response, Martin introduced a new course called “Learning how to Learn” so that their graduates will be able to continue to grow and develop after moving from the campus to the office.
Michael Stern also suggests that if the MBA students don’t have business experience they should at least be taught by people who have experience in the real world. Sanjay Sharma, director of the executive MBA program at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, agrees that part of the problem with regular MBA programs is the large number of instructors who are newly-minted PhDs with no organizational experience. “They know the concepts and are very knowledgeable about their field but are very naive about the real world,” he says. But many people with experience in the working world won’t take the pay cut associated with an academic position and most reward structures at universities place so much emphasis on research and getting published early in an academic’s career, that course development and interaction with businesses gets neglected, he says.
The medical and law schools have addressed this problem by allowing faculty members to practice as well as teach. Not only will this supplement their income but also helps them stay current with new trends in their profession and there is no reason business schools can’t do the same.
While there may be no substitute for experience, a lot of businesses want MBAs at the entry level for management training, says Guy French a partner with the recruitment firm, Corso, Mizgala and French. Particularly attractive are the graduates of specialized programs. For the past few years, many of the business schools have been staking out ground as specialists in training business leaders in specific industries: Queen’s offers an MBA in science and technology, the University of Alberta has a specialization in forestry and agriculture while Dalhousie encourages employees to focus on finance or information systems. The truth of the matter is that if a student wants a career in financial services he’ll be better off going somewhere else to specialize in that field, but if he wants to go into science and technology, then Queen’s would be their best bet, says John Gordon, chair of the MBA for Science and Technology at Queen’s.
“A general basic MBA doesn’t have the caché it use to have,”says Mary Hamblin, director of MBA programs at Dalhousie University in Halifax. But there is still a demand for young inexperienced MBA graduates who can combine good business management with solid gounding in specific industry. “They (employers) want somebody who doesn’t have habits, so that they can mold them and make them good corporate citizens,” she says. “Last year businesses hired our younger students much more readily than our older students.”
So Canadian business schools have been busy reinventing their MBA programs to produce graduates who may once again become a hot commodity for corporate Canada.
In a report released earlier this year, The Conference Board of Canada blamed a “leadership gap,” for the underperformance of Canadian companies and yet some recruiters say there has been a dramatic drop in the demand for MBA grads, once thought of as the natural leaders of tomorrow’s businessworld. The reason? Besides being devalued slightly by their sheer numbers, academics and recruiting specialists alike say the business world has changed dramatically while the business schools hadn’t.
MBA programs aren’t teaching students how to function quickly and effectively in the real world, says Michael Stern of the executive recruitment firm Michael Stern and Associates. “People are looking for someone who can hit the ground running: preferably tomorrow, preferably tomorrow morning.
“To the extent the MBA gives someone a broad business background, it’s nice icing on the cake but it’s thin,” he says. More than a solid grounding in the theory of advanced statistics and financial accounting, businesses want people who have experience applying that theory in the real world. He says that if business schools want to graduate students who will become hot commodities again, they should make much greater use of work terms and co-op programs, consult industry more in structuring MBA programs and find instructors who have more experience in the business world who can pass on their experiences to their students.
Hearing rumblings of discontent and noticing a loss of interest in some of their grads, the business schools are trying to respond.
The result has been a greater emphasis on applied and experiential learning from almost all corners and a trend toward MBA specializations, but for the past two years, the University of Toronto has been raising eyebrows and turning heads as it strives to completely reinvent itself.
Canada has to produce better business talent if it hopes to remain competitive, admits Roger Martin, Dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
Since joining the school in September 1998 Martin has been pushing to reinvent the school’s MBA program — what he calls “Business School 2.0” — with the intent of becoming one of the top 10 business schools in the world by the end of the decade. They started by identfying what they were doing wrong.
He admits a large number of companies have searched for the best graduates from a class and still been disappointed by their ability to adapt, to apply their knowledge and to grow, he says.
Instead businesses were taking many of their MBA graduates and retraining them. “If that’s the case, we came to the conclusion that we have to do a better job of teaching them how to think,” says Ramy Elitzur, an associate professor and executive director of MBA programs at the University of Toronto.
“One of the things that’s wrong with business schools is that they don’t integrate,” says Elitzur. “General MBA programs create people who think in silos. But an accounting problem is not just an accounting problem, they (graduates) have to think about other functions.” So now, in an effort to get students to think more about the big picture, starting from day one, MBA students at Rotman’s take a course that focuses specifically on integrative thinking.
There is also a growing recognition that “broadness and the ability to think,” will define successful managers in the new business environment. (“The best thing you can do is get a good liberal arts undergraduate degree and then go to business school at the graduate level,” Martin says.)
“There’s an argument that people who go to business school are brittle.” They reject new thinking rather than integrate it because it threatens to unravel the brittle foundation upon which their knowledge is based. This is particularly true at an interpersonal level. When people are challenged with different opinions, they tend to dismiss the person with the differing view as mean-spirited or stupid rather than looking for new insights into the matter at hand even if that means approaching something in a completely different manner, he explains.
“IQ doesn’t do it alone. EQ is as important,” he says. And unlike IQ, which is essentially innate, “EQ can be improved if you work at it.” So the U of T is putting a greater emphasis on some of the soft skills.
There was a common complaint: “We have really smart people but it’s unclear if they know how to learn,” he says. In response, Martin introduced a new course called “Learning how to Learn” so that their graduates will be able to continue to grow and develop after moving from the campus to the office.
Michael Stern also suggests that if the MBA students don’t have business experience they should at least be taught by people who have experience in the real world. Sanjay Sharma, director of the executive MBA program at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, agrees that part of the problem with regular MBA programs is the large number of instructors who are newly-minted PhDs with no organizational experience. “They know the concepts and are very knowledgeable about their field but are very naive about the real world,” he says. But many people with experience in the working world won’t take the pay cut associated with an academic position and most reward structures at universities place so much emphasis on research and getting published early in an academic’s career, that course development and interaction with businesses gets neglected, he says.
The medical and law schools have addressed this problem by allowing faculty members to practice as well as teach. Not only will this supplement their income but also helps them stay current with new trends in their profession and there is no reason business schools can’t do the same.
While there may be no substitute for experience, a lot of businesses want MBAs at the entry level for management training, says Guy French a partner with the recruitment firm, Corso, Mizgala and French. Particularly attractive are the graduates of specialized programs. For the past few years, many of the business schools have been staking out ground as specialists in training business leaders in specific industries: Queen’s offers an MBA in science and technology, the University of Alberta has a specialization in forestry and agriculture while Dalhousie encourages employees to focus on finance or information systems. The truth of the matter is that if a student wants a career in financial services he’ll be better off going somewhere else to specialize in that field, but if he wants to go into science and technology, then Queen’s would be their best bet, says John Gordon, chair of the MBA for Science and Technology at Queen’s.
“A general basic MBA doesn’t have the caché it use to have,”says Mary Hamblin, director of MBA programs at Dalhousie University in Halifax. But there is still a demand for young inexperienced MBA graduates who can combine good business management with solid gounding in specific industry. “They (employers) want somebody who doesn’t have habits, so that they can mold them and make them good corporate citizens,” she says. “Last year businesses hired our younger students much more readily than our older students.”
